Originally Posted by Alan
And that's the ultimate point of this investigation. Capitalism works on a two-tiered Kantian model. There's the immanent layer and the rational layer.
New value, in the sense of use value, in the sense of more stuff, of more infrastructure, of higher living conditions. It would be stupid to deny that.
However that layer is completely disconnected to the second layer of rationalized economy. The fact that capitalism creates wealth is a merely contingent outcome of its own stability. When people point out to the wealth that capitalism creates, they're pointing at something external to capitalism. And in the end to balance itself, capitalism creates its own scarcities and inequalities, which in many cases become more brutal than the basic scarcity that preceded it.
It's easy to understand this connection after the financial crash in 2008. Finance capital was and is increasingly becoming the most lucrative form of capital, and finances play a level above actual products and services. The way to make money in the world is not by making a marginal profit in one product at a mass scale, but in investing in the futures of such endeavors and gambling them in the stock market. By the supply and demand of stocks you can create massive wealth just at buying and selling this, toying around with their market values, without that company having had changed its production.
Likewise, capitalism is 'democratic', as much as we can use that word when there's no 'demos'. Capitalism grows by spreading its wealth, but spreading its wealth not to people but to markets, and these markets can be cornered.
The trillions-dollar world economy is worth as much as what capitalism was worth when it only extended to the outskirts of Brimingham, but it expansion allowed even more markets to have an impact on the cemented total market value. There's no reason, however, why this diverse market needs diverse people to function.
In the last 40 years, capitalism has expanded yet centralized, not in states but in multinational businesses and groups like the IMF. This does not contradict what I'm saying about the spread of capital, because they just need to make sure that their capital is in constant movement. The rationale of capital has no relation to the rationale of human welfare.
Marx said that capitalism is the best and worst thing to have happened to humankind, and this is why. It creates abundance, but it creates it as a happy aftermath. There's no reason why we shouldn't go beyond a system whose sole redeeming features exist in spite of its structure and not because of it.
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